Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

"Whatcha want, Father Kino?" a mask-muffled voice heckles him. "Mozart symphony?" In a world where such things still mattered, Thomas would live to regret the outburst. Kean would ensure that he never got certified. The thought is an idle curiosity. It has gone hypothetical, scattered among the dozens of schoolchildren strewn all over Carver's cutting room floors.

One of the scuts obliges by shutting off the media. The decibel level drops so precipitously that Kraft cannot at first place the crash of surf that swooshes in to replace the news. Then physiology returns: the bruits in the capillaries shaking his tympanic membrane. By concentrating, he can mold the sound into the aural hallucination of his choice. He tries his hand at contemporary avant-garde, a piece of pitch equivalents pulled from the points on a random medical chart.

The aleatoric stuff is a piece of cake. Emboldened, he allows it to adhere into the Kindertotenlieder: a little light has gone out in my tent. From there he works massively backward, fashioning the pulse into the censered thrill of Renaissance polyphony, that paltry little Glory to God issuing out of a host of fist-sized boys' choir lungs, the organs he holds now cupped in his hands. Et in terra) the high, hanging resonators soar off, the lines below launching them vaultward with complex but concerted churning, heartsick with courage and perseverance, releasing a plainsong whiff of the place all leading tones lead.

Music issues from inside his skull marrow, an automatic writing like the one his hands obey. The sense is punctured when the notes begin to take their madrigal dictation from another source. He hears the choir above him before he even looks up. There, in the observation mezzanine, a line of children stare down from on high, pressing their palms to the gallery glass.

They gape slowly, like baffled, landed bass, silent except for the soaring twelve-part Stabat Mater sluicing through Kraft's ears. Their motet starts to partake of this grisly Christmas, Saint Nick, their patron, revealed as the all-seeing prep for the Last Judgment. He barely recognizes them, so spruced up, surpliced, tricked out like this, high altos at the very lowest, launching effortlessly into the piece they have been rehearsing all these many weeks. They sound their stunned bit of praise, steeped in the requiem service that assembles them, wringing whole-toned in paradisum from catastrophe's loft.

He has been waiting for them. Chuck the No-Face; Joleene, falset-toing through her Chatty Cathy; the High Latin Hernandez brothers, radiant as altar boys; the Rapparition, springing the hymnal's Index of Meters with his freer syncopations. Today's front line, brought together in his ward for a purpose, have only been awaiting the arrival of these cadres, through the old portals of disappearance, to begin the mop-up evensong, the consolidating tutti heave.

They converge through all history's holes. The child miners are there, the factory fire victims, the bands incarcerated to reduce indigence. The ones converted, over generations of shame, to fable and fairy tale. They ring the observation platform, staring at Kraft's handiwork. On an unseen cue, they break from their antiphony and await orders from the commander of the hour, his face more beaked and wizened, head balder, nervous energy more premeditated when seen from a story below.

Little Father Time in his Dodger cap counts casualties, scouring the bloodbath for the expected sign. His eyes, from this distance, dart around the shredded scraps like sparrows after lunch crumbs. The inventory of his gaze courses over the head wounds and exploded chests. His own face absorbs the features of those that are food-processed beyond recognition, no longer identifiable as human.

That look settles on the pieces of disintegrating sponge Kraft pretends to sew together. Kraft follows the glance down, sees the girl under his instruments for the first time. He traces with his gloved hand the still-gushing projectile gash. He places his finger in the ruptured esophagus, the severed tendons relaxing what's left of her mouth into a Quattrocento smile radiating peace. She will be spared, at least, reaching comprehension. The age of consent.

He looks up at the loft, helplessly. What? What do you want me to do? The answer is impossible; the girl steps from behind Nico, comes from the shadow where she has hidden. He almost tears from the operating team, breaks for the mezzanine stairs to grab her, carry her back to Intensive Care. But the measured, appraising stare she levels at him fixes him in place. Something is different about her, a change he cannot quite name. Then it comes to him. She is upright. Whole. Her legs restored.

All at once they are beckoning, bailing scoops of air over their shoulders. They turn, point, gesture down a path that won't wait. Kraft's eyes well with salt. He pleads with them to stay just a minute longer. I can't. Not now. I can't abandon this in the middle.

It takes him only one stopped heartbeat to realize, humiliated: the come away is not meant for him. What would they want with a traitor, a grotesque, repulsive giant, a freak who would smash any clubhouse he tried to squeeze into, a sellout double agent in the pay of age? He snickers at his mistake, the arrogance of it, the pitiful decrepit who cannot recognize his own wrinkles in the mirror. Not him: they have come to whisk off their slaughtered school friends.

The a cappella Knabenchor resumes. Their ravishing high notes launch a pathetic prayer at the clerestory, a help message holding at bay, for one more hemiola, the floodgate crossing. All sick persons, and young children. The fatherless children, and widows. All that travel by land or by water. Give peace in our time. Defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night. The tune flies up, flushed like a suicidal game bird. It keeps going, up past the atmosphere, eternal as tempered alloy, as awful and permanent as a satellite plowing the black vacuum, pointlessly rehearsing its greeting, millennia after the message senders have all gone.

Kraft sinks back into the pointless exercise, just short of salvage and past salvation. He works head down, endlessly steeped in bodily punishment, an automaton in darkness. He does not look up again at the observation glass or at the faces of the mauled meat packings under his hands.

Tempo imperceptibly shades off. It would be possible to stop and count bodies now, if one were inclined. The field lies, if not cleared, at least preliminarily shoveled. A portion of the mown-down children have been rerouted, airlifted to "more appropriate area facilities," as Admin informs the press. Another portion, steadily rising, are lost in post-op, give up languidly on the table, or fulfill the prognostic leveled at them on arrival.

He cannot say how his colleagues hold out. All but the most manic one or two have long since stopped talking except to call for the occasional clamp. A round robin of catnaps takes over when the rush of violence no longer suffices to kill fatigue. Chief comes and taps you on the shoulder; it's your turn to dive into oblivion a while. As Kraft goes down, the darkness is so thick and sticky that it coos at him.

Needless to say, he goes on cutting and sewing in sleep. Creatures spring out of cracked kid chests at him; whole bodies disappear down holes that open up in the operating table. They die on him even faster here.

Reports filter in, litter his dreamscape with the everyday surreal. With the whole surgical staff overwhelmed by this brilliant diversion, the guerrillas move in and the nightmare evacuation begins in earnest. In the chaos created by the assault, the preemies disappear into thin smog, along with their Plexiglas incubators. In their wake, the second wave — the severe handicaps and defects — disperse as one. They were just waiting; he might have pieced it together. Camped, quartered until the arrival of this go-ahead.